Sonic Intervention


Enjoy your waiting. If you can hear the music while you are waiting for an elevator and green light, then can you guess what things will happen? What would you like to do while you are waiting for the elevator or green light on a street? I thought that you might see your phone without the reason or just waste the time. It is too boring although the waiting time was not pretty long. How to make this time to be more exciting and to be enjoyed? It was my initial question, thus I decided to solve this problem with some graphic design and sound for project 3 in ARTGR 698 class. First attempting for solving this problem, I made a play button using an icon and tested at an elevator in the College of Design. I installed the button on the call button and located a Bluetooth speaker on the top of the structure that included the call button. After observation of the person reacts, I could know how to develop my method for the final documentary. The most important thing I concerned about was to reduce confusion about the button. People hesitated to press button when they were the button, because of the play icon. It made people get confused about the function of the button, they want to call the elevator to go upper floor but the symbol looked like that you could go left side not an upper floor. Thus, I had to solve this problem, too. For my final, I designed buttons with more functions and text to use on the elevator and the traffic light. Buttons for the elevator have UPtempo, DN tempo and three more icons for rewind, forward and stop, and traffic light button has the only text “PLAY shuffle”. Therefore I put the Bluetooth speaker on the ground to make that people do not find speaker before the music starts. After installing all the materials for my observation, I recorded people reacting with my graphics and music. People felt less confusing than my first trying, therefore people could enjoy music and try to press other buttons to change music. Finally, I succeed to solve the problem that how to make people enjoy their waiting time. This project is also an exciting experience for me, because of a person’s reacting. I used extremely low technologies such as printed-paper, speaker and my I-phone. When people press the button, I also press the play button or others of my I-phone to start, change and stop the music. However, I could know that we can change human behavior, through little changes like this project. Sometimes, I want to apply this to another place that people have to wait for a while. If you want to see the process of this, click the link below.


2015 Spring
Iowa State University Graduate Study
Instructor: Braidwood, Alex

Scroll to top